


Left Behind

by stormandstarlight



Category: The Witcher (TV), Wiedźmin | The Witcher - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst with a Happy Ending, Found Family, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Hurt Jaskier | Dandelion, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Recovery, ish, no beta we die like witchers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-12
Updated: 2020-05-13
Packaged: 2021-03-03 05:34:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 7,406
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24149794
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stormandstarlight/pseuds/stormandstarlight
Summary: Jaskier was supposed to be the one to die first.Not Geralt. Never Geralt.And yet... here they are.
Relationships: Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia/Jaskier | Dandelion, only at the very end - Relationship, sort of - Relationship
Comments: 67
Kudos: 178





	1. Chapter 1

_Jaskier_ was supposed to be the one who died first. Not…

Not Geralt. Never…

Not _Geralt_.

* * *

So much time spent together, through pretty much everything the Continent could throw at a Witcher and his bard and then some. And then -- and then it was the mountain, and Geralt was hurting so much that Jaskier could _feel_ it, like a fishhook underneath his breastbone -- ooh, that’s a good one, he should use that one -- and there was nothing he could do but watch as Geralt turned all that thorny pain right back in on himself, lashing out in a desperate attempt to protect his vulnerable heart, like a wounded wolf.

Jaskier had forgiven him before he was even halfway down the mountain.

Oh, he’d _wanted_ to hold a grudge, but ever since he was a little boy, getting teased by his older cousins, he’d never been able to keep his anger, and he’d _never_ hold one against his Wolf.

So he’d forgiven the Witcher, but the Witcher hadn’t forgiven himself and had left town before Jaskier could find him to make up with him. He’d decided to let him have his space, simmer down -- he was still a little, well, _mad_ , and he more than intended to give Geralt the scolding of his life when they inevitably ran into each other again, and it seemed like it would be a good idea to let both of them cool down for a bit, away from each other, before they had the talk about how “you can’t drive people away just because you’re afraid of being hurt, Geralt, it’s called being _alive_ , and besides, I’d _never_ hurt you”.

So he’d wandered around a little bit, gone town to town, played the few songs he’d written that weren’t about the White Wolf, slowly worked up the courage to go and confront him, when Yennefer of _fucking_ Vengerberg had walked through a portal in the _middle_ of his set and dragged him away into the inn yard, where the rain that had been falling steadily for the past three hours had turned the ground into thick dark mud. He’d barely even had time to click his lute into its case to protect it from the damp before he was outside, getting _rained_ on and _covered_ in liquefied stableyard.

He’d stared at her, almost too mad to speak, and had just worked up the breath to start in on a spluttering “You-- you--” when she held up something small and silver, swinging freely on a thin chain.

That was when he’d noticed the paired swords slung over her shoulder, held uncomfortably, like they burned her skin, like she couldn’t bear to touch them.

She’d dropped the medallion into his hand, the wolf’s-head imprint grinning up at him.

Every time he’d touched the medallion before -- a grand total of _three times_ \-- it had been warm from Geralt’s body heat, humming softly. It had felt warm, real, _alive_.

Now it’d just felt cold. Dead. 

He’d looked up at Yennefer, mouth open but nothing coming out, and she’d shaken her head, those violet eyes gleaming too-bright in the darkness.

He’d followed her wordlessly through a portal then, gripping the freezing circle of silver in his palm, silently begging it to warm.

It never did.

The scene that the portal dumped them at was identical to a dozen others around the Continent that Jaskier had seen in twenty years of travelling with a Witcher. A cave, big and black and ominous. Strange scratch marks around the entrance. The stink of sweet rot and blood drifting out from the depths, ominous as a sudden fog or bloody sky. It had been near dawn, in this place, far enough from the inn he’d been playing at to make a significant time difference.

She’d led him wordlessly into the depths, where the scent of rot got stronger and stronger, mixed with the weird metallic-ozone- _old_ smell of the _really_ dangerous monsters. The way had been lit by a little floating ball of light, just enough to see where to put his feet by.

The tunnel had ended in a great round space, walls polished smoother than a purely natural cave, and in the very center were two figures, slumped on the slightly concave floor. One was the body of the monster, nearly hacked to bits, unrecognizable.

The other…

Jaskier’s feet had frozen in place, his legs that had carried him form one side of the Continent to the other and back again refusing to take one more step. Yennefer had rested one hand on his shoulder, silent comfort from a place he’d never expected to receive it, and he could feel the silent shudder in her grip, the way she was just barely holding herself together.

After an eternity, there in the dark, he’d stepped forward, once, then again, and then he’d run, slipping, sliding, skidding to his knees in front of the black-shrouded body because _no_ , because _it couldn’t be_ , because _it was never supposed to end like this,_ he had a _destiny_ , a _future_ , not just some dank and slimy cave in the middle of nowhere like any common Witcher, not the White Wolf, not his _Geralt_ \--

He’d pulled back the hood of the black cloak that covered it -- Geralt’s cloak, he’d spent a dozen nights wrapped up in it when his own blankets were insufficient for the cold -- covered _him_ , and-- and--

The face that lay under the rough woolen fabric looked like it could have been sleeping, the few times that Jaskier had actually seen him asleep. Mouth and forehead smoothed out of that perpetual scowl, eyes closed and restful, hair tucked away from his face, hands folded neatly over his chest. 

Yennefer had walked up behind him. "I didn’t think you’d want to see him the way he was-- before.”

He’d spun on her, then, lunging to his full height, demanding to know how she’d known before him, how she’d gotten there before him, if she’d been there when it happened, if she’d just _let_ him--

She’d let him scream himself out, voice echoing around and around the cave until the smell and the sound and the sheer sick feeling in his stomach of _no no no_ **_please no_ ** had pulled him right back down onto his knees and his face into the curve of Geralt’s neck, cold like ice and stiff with rigor mortis. The silver-studded armor had been hard and uncomfortable against Jaskier’s chest, but he’d ignored it, hanging on desperately like he could pull the soul right back to the body even as the blood from the torn stomach had soaked into his doublet.

“The djinn,” Yennefer had said. He’d ignored her, even as everything inside him was screaming _the djinn, the djinn, of course it was the fucking **djinn--**_

“Geralt made a wish that… tied us together. It broke, when… It broke. I managed to use the remnants to trace it back to here. There was... there was nothing...”

She’d been about to cry, he’d realized, but he couldn’t bring himself to comfort her.

So he’d stayed there, draped over the dead body of the only person he’d ever, really, _down-deep_ _loved_ in a way that transcended everything he’d ever felt for anyone before, even his University girl- (and boy-)friends, his courtly flings and noble muses, and even that one village girl he could’ve spent his whole life side-by-side with.

Because it hadn’t been her he’d given his whole life to, had it?

It had been Geralt, the one and only Geralt of Rivia, his White Wolf.

It had always and only ever been Geralt.

* * *

He could have spent the rest of eternity in that cave in the middle of nowhere, stayed there until time gave up and the world decided to end outside that rocky mouth, but the stench got to him eventually, forcing him to twist away so as not to get vomit all over… it. Yennefer, with strength belying her small form, had dragged him to his feet, and together, they’d hauled the body out into the breaking dawn, still wrapped in that black cloak.

Roach had been waiting a little ways away, tethered to a tree. She’d recognized Jaskier (they hadn’t even been apart for any longer than normal this time, a winter, nothing more), gone to nudge at the pocket of his doublet for sugar cubes before encountering the blood smeared all over his front and whickering, tossing her head and mane fretfully. He’d patted her on the neck, but she’d shied away from him, nostrils flaring, and he sighed and went to remove Geralt’s kit from her back: potions bag, bedroll, food bags, the little axe (because even _Jaskier_ knew that you didn’t use something as finely crafted and delicate as a _sword_ for cutting firewood) that Jaskier had unhooked and walked away with, leaving Roach whinnying uncertainly after him.

Yennefer had picked a spot in the middle of an open mountain meadow, covered with spring flowers, yellow and white and blue, and Jaskier had been too numb to do anything more than look at it and walk off into the forest.

He’d taken his anger out on some poor tree, hacking down branches, sinking the blade of the axe so deep into the trunk he had to yank ungracefully on the handle to get it free again. It wasn’t _good_ firewood, but it would burn, and that was all he needed.

Geralt had… _told_ him about this, years ago, that Witchers burned their dead, and if he ever died he’d like Jaskier to do the same for him, but Jaskier had laughed it off because Geralt? _Dying?_ It was impossible. It was _Geralt_. He’d survived where dozens of other Witchers hadn’t, endured decades of hatred and fear and prejudice, fought things that Jaskier could barely imagine, and he’d survived it all with a _hmm_ and a _fuck_ and a golden glare that softened into exhaustion or fondness or even contentment when he didn’t think anyone was looking.

He couldn’t just… he couldn’t just die. He _couldn’t_. He was Geralt of Rivia, the White Wolf, the greatest Witcher to ever have _lived_! He couldn’t…

Jaskier had sat down there in the dirt, axe slumping at his feet, and cried. He’d bawled his eyes and heart out, there in the middle of nowhere with a sorceress he’d been jealous of since he’d met her and the body of the man he'd loved less than a ten-minute walk away.

Yennefer had found him there, gathered up the logs he’d cut with a flick of her hand, and left him to his grief. He’d cried himself out into the dirt and the uncaring world, until his insides felt like a rag wrung dry and twisted up into knots, and then he’d stood up and gone back out into the meadow, where Geralt’s body rested on the makeshift pyre, wrapped in his cloak, medallion resting brilliantly silver over where his chest was.

She’d set it alight with a word, and they’d stood there, in silence, not friends, not enemies, not jealous rivals, not even mere acquaintances, really, but something else, something more, until the fire had burned down to ashes and embers, and Jaskier had stepped forward to pull the unmelted medallion from the remains as the sunset, bloody-red and gold, had played over the meadow full of flowers yellow and white and blue and the last ashes of the flames. 

It was still smooth and silver and cold, and he’d wrapped his hand around it and held it tight until it felt like it might give him frostbite, and then he’d tucked it away into his pocket and turned away.

Yennefer had been standing right in front of him. She'd held the paired swords out to him, silently, and he’d stared at her and stared at her until she’d looked away. “I think,” she’d said, “I think he'd have liked you to have them. If it was anyone.”

He’d accepted them from her then, even though the weight nearly made his knees buckle, and she’d smiled at him, and asked him where he wanted to go. He told her first the inn, to gather his things, and then-- “Home.”

“Home?”

“Lettenhove.”

He hadn’t been back in over twenty years, but he didn't care. It was somewhere he wouldn’t have to sing for his supper, somewhere he wouldn’t have to look people who cared about him in the eye and tell them that the love of his life was dead, that he wouldn’t be leaving after the winter to go travel with his muse again. In Lettenhove, he could just-- hide in his room, until all of this went away and he could breathe without his heart bleeding out into his chest and suffocating him.

Yennefer had nodded and made the portals, pressing a tiny purple crystal into his hand. “If you ever need to contact me,” she’d said, and he’d pocketed it without saying a word. He’d let her have Roach; he wouldn’t have known what to do with Geralt’s horse, not without Geralt. And he’d been sure -- reasonably sure -- that Yennefer would care for her. He hadn’t looked back, even at her plaintive whinny, when he’d walked away from the meadow where he’d burned the love of his life.

* * *

He’d drifted around Lettenhove for a month or thereabouts, until he was a little more functional. He'd avoided his parents, who didn’t care about his mood anyways (to them he was just acting the same way he always had, never mind that he was forty now, not sixteen and desperate to get out), spoken little to the servants, terrified his cousins with the way he refused to talk or eat more than necessary to keep himself alive and upright, failed to bathe with anything approaching regularity or to bother with the carefully tailored doublets he’d worn since he’d been old enough to choose his own clothes.

He’d drifted, drifted, drifted, until the weight of everything pressed down so heavily on his chest that he couldn’t breathe, until the numbness filled him up from the inside and crushed his heart against his ribs, and then he had run, pulled on the carefully made boots (that Geralt had paid for) that fitted his feet _just so_ and set out for Novigrad and Oxenfurt. The trip had been long, achingly familiar and horribly different. He’d paid his way with his parents’ money, not by playing in taverns, had walked alone, not alongside a grumpy Witcher, hadn’t talked or played or sung on the road as the summer’d spun round him and turned into fall. With the two massive longswords slung over his shoulder, no one had bothered to mess with him, even though he probably looked like he could barely lift _one_ of them. 

He’d reached Oxenfurt just as the weather started to get cold. The Dean there had accepted him easily (he _was_ famous, after all), given him a class to teach and a room on campus, and he’d settled into teaching composition and presentation, writing music about-- small things. Things like the turning of the seasons, and exiled lords who really ran away from home to find true love, and sorceresses with skins of ice that melted when they cried. (That one never did well, the subject matter too abstract, too different from his known works to really get any traction.)

The prevailing rumor on campus had been that Geralt had broken his heart, and that was why he hadn’t talked about his travels or about Witchers or sung his songs about the White Wolf. Because Geralt had broken his heart, and Jaskier, he who loved easily and freely, and had his heart broken every other week, practically, had been in too much pain to do anything at all (like heartbreak wouldn’t inspire him to just write a whole bunch of mournful and/or bitchy songs about the whole thing), and had been all winter long. 

In a way, they weren’t wrong. Geralt had broken his heart every day, just by existing, just by the knowledge that he’d never really loved Jaskier the way Jaskier had loved him, but it was a sweeter sort of ache, something tragic, beautiful, that had tugged on his poet’s soul. Unrequited love, the stuff of stories and songs, and Geralt, even if he hadn’t loved Jaskier back _like that_ , had been there, all the time, had cared about him, considered him a friend (even if he vehemently denied it every time Jaskier brought it up), and for twenty years that had been enough. 

Jaskier would have been content to live like that for the rest of his life. Had been convinced he _would_ live like that for the rest of his life, that he would’ve retired to Oxenfurt anyways in a few years, would’ve settled into teaching and found a way to meet up with Geralt very few months or so, would’ve settled into that life, would’ve died old and grey and happy here on campus with Geralt looking like he'd barely aged a day, and it would’ve been a _good_ life.

He didn’t know what to do now that that life was gone.

Now that Geralt was gone.

* * *

News of the war to the south slowly filtered up to Novigrad, and most of it he ignored, but the news of the sacking of Cintra made him pause.

Cirilla Fiona Elen Riannon was in Cintra, Pavetta's daughter, Geralt’s Child Surprise that the Witcher had dome his damnedest to try to forget existed. He’d seen her regularly, playing for Queen Calanthe’s court, had even composed a song or two for the little princess, keeping a light eye on her when Geralt wouldn’t, but he didn’t know her _personally_. He couldn’t really fault Geralt for leaving his Child Surprise to be raised a Princess and later Queen of Cintra, instead of a Witcher’s daughter, out on the open road, pursued by monsters at all times, living out of inns, but he _could_ very well fault him for never going to see her even once, leaving Jaskier to pick up the slack.

And besides, the numbness had come back, compressing his lungs, leaving his head feeling like it was stuffed full of clouds colored bloody-red and gold. He could barely breathe, anymore, suffocating under the weight of it, so he packed up his bags and slung his lute over his shoulder, bought a dapple-grey gelding with his University stipend and rode out for Cintra.

He met Cirilla well away from where he’d expected to, pursued by Nilfgaardian soldiers, hiding by a small traveler’s well at the side of the road, discovered her by having her run blindly straight into his chest with enough force to knock the wind out of him in her joy to see a familiar face at last, even if it was just a bard who sometimes played at court.

She called him Jaskier, told him she was looking for Geralt, that he traveled with Geralt, didn’t he, everyone knew that, did he know where he was? Because she was Geralt’s Child Surprise, see, and her grandmother had told her to find him--

He cut her off with a choked-out sob, and told her that Geralt wasn’t coming.

“Does he not want me?” she asked, thin face with its bright eyes and prominent cheekbones turned up to look at him, guileless and just a little bit sad, like she already knew the answer, like she knew she was just stalling the inevitable.

He looked her in the eye, and told her. She was the first person he’d told the truth to, and it ended with him slumped on the ground crying like he hadn’t since the meadow, the Princess Cirilla hugging him and stroking her small fingers through his hair in a quiet attempt to comfort him.

He’d cried himself into a wrung-out dishrag again, staggered to his feet, taken her tiny hand, and told her that he was going to take her to a safe place, somewhere Nilfgaard couldn’t get her. He used the little purple crystal to call Yennefer, told her that he had Geralt’s Child Surprise and that he needed her help. 

He didn’t know what it was that persuaded her to come. Maybe it was the fact that neither of them had disliked each other quite so much after standing side-by-side at that pyre, maybe it was the fact that she'd always wanted a child, and if she couldn’t have one of her own, Geralt’s Child Surprise would be good enough, maybe it was the fact that this was _Geralt’s_ Child Surprise. Whatever the reason, she came.

She came through a portal and smiled at him, sadly, and if her violet eyes weren’t as bright as he remembered, he didn’t comment. She spent a long time looking at Cirilla, before leaning down to hug her and whispering something in her ear, something that Jaskier couldn’t catch but made Cirilla smile, tiny and frail and beautiful, smile like she hadn’t before, really, not even when she first saw Jaskier.

He told Yennefer that they needed to go to Kaer Morhen, the Witcher stronghold, that he thought he could beg sanctuary from Vesemir or Eskel or whoever was in charge (he didn’t really know much about the Witcher hierarchy, only the things Geralt had mentioned late at night around the campfire or when he was _really truly_ drunk).

She stared at him skeptically, then looked at Cirilla, staring up at the both of them with those big green eyes and that white hair so _very_ like Geralt’s, sighed, and agreed.

* * *

They couldn’t portal their way straight into the keep; the wards were too strong, and they’d probably have all been slaughtered by overprotective Witchers even if they had. So they arrived about halfway up the trail, Jaskier yanking on the reins of his reluctant horse to get it to go through the portal, Cirilla and Yennefer staring around them at the soaring, sweeping majesty of the mountains.

He’d never really been to Kaer Morhen, before, but he knew that Geralt spoke fondly of it and of Vesemir, and it was, really, their only hope. Cirilla was important, that much was clear, and based on the stories she’d told them of running from Nilfgaard in the single night they’d spent together so far, they’d do anything to get their hands on her. Still, with every step up the mountain, the doubt roiling in his stomach tried to pull him back, telling him they’d be turned away; that without Geralt there, they had no hope.

This--

This was supposed to have fucking been _Geralt’s_ destiny, not Jaskier's. He wasn’t supposed to be travelling with a bitchy sorceress and an exiled princess to the last Witcher stronghold; he was supposed to be travelling with _Geralt,_ writing songs, telling stories, loving him from a distance.

He tried to ignore the hot pressure that built up in his sinuses, behind his eyes, but it grew and grew and grew until he had no choice but to let it out as bitter tears, struggling with clenched fists to keep them in. If Cirilla and Yennefer noticed, they didn’t say anything.

The gates of Kaer Morhen were opened to their knock by Eskel, the scarred Witcher. Jaskier had met him a time or two, out on the road. Geralt had always been more enthusiastic about running into him than _literally_ anything else Jaskier had ever seen, all big smiles and hugs and stories of his latest exploits told over half a dozen pints of the finest ale available. He called him _brother_ , smiled at him in a way he never smiled at Jaskier, actually laughed at the things he said,

Eskel, in his own right, was significantly friendlier than Geralt, willing to actually talk and tell stories and _appreciate_ Jaskier’s _singing_. They’d traveled as a group for a few days, one time, before splitting off, and it had been the most jovial thing he could remember in twenty years.

Lambert, on the other hand, was a _prick_. Even Geralt admitted as such, although he obviously still cared for the man. Jaskier had only met him once, and once was enough, thank you. Although it was likely he’d be spending an entire winter cooped up in a single keep with him, with nowhere to go and nothing to do…

Jaskier tore his thoughts away from that and focused on Eskel again. The Witcher brought his hand towards his sword in confusion at the sight of Jaskier, in his dusty and battered university finery, and looked up at Yennefer and Cirilla sitting on the dapple-grey gelding.

His eyes tracked over her, then down to the horse’s side and the two swords hanging there, and something in Jaskier broke, just a little. Having Geralt’s _brothers_ know about his death made it… more final, more terrible, somehow, to be the bearer of that news to the people that undoubtedly knew Geralt far better than he ever had.

Eskel looked at him, taking in his tear-stained face, the puffy redness of his eyes, the hard clench of his fists, and despite being a Witcher, despite being trained out or feeling fear for the entirety of his century-long life, something behind those golden eyes trembled, just a little.

“What happened?”

Jaskier couldn’t speak. The words were caught up in his throat, tangled up in messy knots of grief and loss and love. He couldn’t _breathe_ around them, could only stand there and struggle to hold back another wave of tears.

‘Where’s Geralt? Jaskier, what are you doing here? Who are they?” getting louder with each question, until his voice was ringing off the walls, “dammit, bard, _where’s my brother?_ ”

And that brought the tears out full force, streaming down his face to make little dark spots in the dust on his doublet. He reached into his pocket to pull out the little circle of silver that he’d kept since that day in the meadow, transferred from pocket to pocket because it was the last piece of Geralt that he really had, and he couldn’t bear to leave it away from him for even so long as a day. It swung from its silver chain between them, freezing cold, and the Witcher caught it in one gloved and stared at it for a long time.

Jaskier could see him just-- shut down. 

Eskel rubbed one hand over his face, fingers trailing along the lines of his scars, and said “I think you’d better come in.”

* * *

Jaskier and Yennefer went in to beg sanctuary with Vesemir. He’d cleaned up, a little, wiped his face, changed his doublet, but he knew that raw grief was still apparent in every move he made. Eskel had taken over with Cirilla and Jaskier had been too numb to stop him, letting him take the girl down to the kitchens to get some food while the others talked.

Vesemir glared at them and seemed like he might refuse them out of hand, but when Cirilla crept in, tiny and scared and undoubtedly heavily traumatized, he sighed, looked at Geralt’s medallion held tightly in one hand, and said they could stay for the winter, as a favor for a fallen… the old Witcher said _friend_ , but under that Jaskier heard _brother_ , heard _child_ , heard _my son_.

Jaskier couldn’t even take that acceptance as a victory. He just wanted Geralt here with him.

* * *

That first winter was… hard. Eskel was as kind as he knew how to be, but he was a Witcher, raised around Witchers, and barely knew the three of them, and besides, he was grieving Geralt as much as any of them. _More_ , given that Jaskier and Yennefer had had months to come to terms with it, and he'd had only a few days to deal with the death of his brother in all but blood. Vesemir was cautious and cold, and while he had every right to be, his mistrust crept out to everyone in the keep. Yennefer, for all her dreams of motherhood, had very little idea of how to treat a child, especially a princess who saw her world destroyed and replaced by a poor substitute for a Father Surprise and a cold, drafty keep filled with distant adults who knew nothing about raising children. 

And Lambert…

Lambert was angry.

Jaskier couldn’t blame him. If he wasn’t so numb to everything, all his emotions swaddled up in soft wool just to allow him to keep functioning, he’d be angry too, angry at the thing that took Geralt, angry at Yennefer for not saving him, angry at Destiny for taking him away. But Lambert took it out on _everyone_ but Ciri, snapping, snarling, and on one memorable occasion, nearly throwing Jaskier into a wall until Eskel tackled him to the ground and they ended up in a brawl that concluded with cracked ribs on both sides and a broken nose for Lambert.

Jaskier had to pack everything away, just to be the functional one. The one who comforted Ciri through her nightmares, who made sure that Eskel and Vesemir ate instead of just wasting away in the library or on the training grounds, who persuaded Yennefer to help train Ciri’s magic instead of furiously going through the library in the keep. She wouldn't tell him what she was looking for, but he got a look at the books, once, and recognized several titles rumored at Oxenfurt to contain spells for raising the dead. He hid those away, after, in Vesemir's office, and stood numbly through her angry tirade until Ciri came running to him for comfort form her latest nightmare. He left Yennefer behind him, staring off into the distance in shock, and felt nothing. Just tired.

He had to be the one who organized meals and who was to cook them, training schedules, who tried to redirect Lambert’s anger and Eskel’s aimless sorrow. He had to be the competent one, and he was just… he was numb.

That was all.

Numb.

* * *

The numbness broke, one morning near spring, and he curled up in his room in one of the keep towers and just _cried_. Cried until his voice cracked and broke, cried until he could only breathe through his mouth, cried until his pillow was soaked with snot and tears and saliva, cried until there was nothing left inside but a big dark void that wept _I love you I love you **I love you**_ to the place where Geralt had been, and even in life, Jaskier knew that Geralt wouldn't have believed it if he’d told him. Wouldn’t have thought himself worthy, deserving of Jaskier’s love. 

Ciri came and sat with him, during, passed him handkerchiefs and let him sniffle into her white hair (once his face was clean, of course), and she cried a little, too, for the loss of Cintra and her grandparents and the father Destiny gave her but she never really knew, and Jaskier told her the story of her parent’s betrothal and Geralt’s invocation of the Law of Surprise.

He kept telling her stories, after, stories about the White Wolf and his great and glorious battles, about Geralt of Rivia and his hard shell and scary face but soft insides, about the way he’d take a job for less or nothing if people really needed it, about the way he never thought himself worthy of love but Jaskier couldn’t help but love him anyways, about Geralt and his wry sense of humor, about the time with the lusty ram (and _maaaybe_ that wasn’t quite appropriate for a child Ciri’s age, but it made her laugh, so), about the way he _purred_ when he got really drunk.

They stayed in his tower room all day, foregoing Ciri’s training in magic and Witchering, ignoring the bell that Vesemir rang to signal lunch. At one point footsteps stopped outside his door and stayed to listen, walking away only when he fell silent for the last time.

That evening, after dinner, he fetched his long-neglected lute down to the great hall and sat by the fire and _played_. His calluses had grown soft over months of disuse, and his fingertips turned pink, then red, then stinging and bloody, but still he played on. Sometimes just the backing parts to his White Wolf ballads, sometimes pure instrumentals, sometimes just music, wordless, unending, poured out from his soul into those strings.

He didn't sing, the words still caught up in that knot of grief and loss and love, but that was okay, because they’d come back in time. 

* * *

That summer, the Witchers left to head back out on the Path, and Yennefer took Jaskier and Ciri to Oxenfurt, where Jaskier dyed the girl's hair dark brown like his own, got Yennefer to cast an illusion to make her eyes blue, introduced her as his illegitimate and subsequently adopted daughter (no one questioned it, which, he supposed, was another advantage to having a reputation like his) and managed to get her enrolled in one of the classes for children of the professors. Yennefer disappeared off to who-knew-where, following her own interests, but she checked back every couple of weeks, bringing some small trinket for Ciri: a book, a pretty glass bauble from Kaedwen, a hat of braided grasses from the plainlands.

He taught music and composition in the spring and summer and fall, and while he still didn't sing of the White Wolf, he told anyone who was willing to listen about Witchers; their nobility, their history, and if Geralt happened to come up, well, he _had_ been the Witcher Jaskier knew best.

He’d gotten used to referring to Geralt in the past tense. It didn’t hurt any more. Like he was laying something to a long-deserved rest.

They went back to Kaer Morhen for the winter, all three of them, Jaskier and Yennefer and Ciri, and Ciri trained, and Jaskier played his lute in the evenings, sometimes even songs of the White Wolf, and no one commented on the tears left behind afterwards. Geralt’s swords had been mounted on the wall, silver over steel, and Vesemir had given Geralt's medallion back to Jaskier.

“It’ll keep you safe. Just don’t--”

“Wear it, yeah, I know, that’d be impolite, not a Witcher, after all,” Jaskier finished for him, and slipped the cold circle into his pocket, where it settled against his hip, a chill reminder of the best twenty years of his life.

* * *

And that’s how the seasons went. Springs and summers and falls at Oxenfurt, teaching Ciri and the other students, playing his lute in bardic competitions, gaining the title of Master Bard, seeing his songs be recorded and written down in the great books in the library of the University’s masterworks, spreading the legend of the White Wolf, his Geralt of Rivia, the greatest Witcher to ever have lived. Winters at Kaer Morhen, watching Ciri learn to fight with deadly grace, seeing Yen teach her how to control the massive power inside her, chatting with Eskel about his summer on the Path, sniping casually back and forth with Lambert, insults traded over the dinner table, and Vesemir presiding over it all, Geralt’s swords watching over their little family.

At one point he got the old Wolf’s permission to write a history of Witchers, all the way from their creation in the early days of the Continent, when every town had been fortified, when a harvest might be as deadly as a war, when to walk alone outside the walls meant certain death, to the present day and the remaining double-dozen Witchers or so still walking the Path. He spent nearly three winters writing it all down, everything he could learn from the Kaer Morhen library and Vesemir’s stories, with an entire volume dedicated to the tales of the last of the School of the Wolf, the last three Wolf Witchers.

Wolf Witchers he thought of as family, now, enough time spent in their company that they were like brothers to him. They never meant the same as Geralt had, but nothing could really _replace_ Geralt. Eskel and Lambert and Vesemir and Yen and especially Ciri didn’t try. They each found their own space, in his heart with all its endless capacity to love, and he didn’t think he would have given this up for the world. 

(Maybe for Geralt. But only maybe.)

* * *

Ciri was eighteen years old, an adult, and she was as deadly a fighter as Geralt ever was, as strong a sorceress as Yen, and he couldn’t, in all good faith, keep her cooped up with him anymore. She wanted to go out into the wider world, find a way to bring Cintra back, and so he gave her his blessing and a bound copy of his White Wolf cycle. Yen gave her a little purple crystal, to call if she needed anything, Eskel gave her a finely wrought daggers, with a carven selkiemore tooth for a hilt. Lambert, true to form, gave her a whole bunch of bombs and a detailed list of the best ways to bring a castle down to rubble, and Vesemir took Geralt’s swords down from where they’d hung above the hearth and presented them to her with all the gravity such an occasion imported, and if both Jaskier and Eskel had to turn away and scrub at their eyes, well, no one said anything.

She dressed herself in Witcher armor, swords slung over her back, and with her white hair and sharply-cut face, she looked so much like Geralt Jaskier’s aging heart gave a funny squeeze in his chest. It wasn’t a-- _painful_ squeeze, but it did remind him of how far they’d all come from where this all began, with Jaskier weeping at Kaer Morhen’s gate and Eskel begging to know what happened to his brother.

From that pile of ashes in a meadow full of flowers, as the sunset washed bloody light over him.

* * *

And the seasons changed, and the years passed, and he taught at Oxenfurt, published his history of the Witcher Schools, won awards for his songs, grew a beard just for the hell of it, spent his winters at Kaer Morhen with Eskel and Lambert and Vesemir and Yen and Ciri, who was basically his daughter even if he had no legal claim on her.

And he told his students about the years he spent with the White Wolf, about Pavetta’s betrothal feast, and a djinn and a sorceress, and a dragon hunt, and the King of the Elves at the Edge of the World, and even, sometimes, the one about the lusty ram (although Geralt would have killed him for telling that one to the world at large).

His hair was entirely grey, silver shining like the medallion in his pocket. He no longer wintered at Kaer Morhen, where the cold settled too deep into his bones for comfort; instead Yen and Ciri and all the rest came and visited him at Oxenfurt, told him stories of the rest of the world. They were all still young and beautiful, sorcery and Witcher mutations and eleven blood keeping them that way for something near forever, and he found he didn’t care. He’d lived his time; spent his youth in the best way possible, had a better family than he ever _dreamed_ of finding, when he was young and sixteen and desperate to get out, loved and laughed and _lived_ , and it had been a _good_ life.

And so, in the early spring, when the mountains were blooming yellow and white and blue, when the sun was setting with sheeting curtains of blood-red and gold, he pulled out the little purple crystal he'd worn next to his heart for thirty years and called his family.

There was weeping, of course, mainly from Ciri, but they all knew this was coming. They’d been talking about it for years, debating what they were going to do. Yen had offered to give him immortality, but immortality without Geralt was a bleak prospect, and so he'd respectfully declined.

“I’m not a sorcerer, or a Witcher, or a princess,” he’d said, “I’m just Jaskier the bard. Seventy years or so is plenty of life for _anyone_ , and I’ll take my chances with living longer. Thanks, Yen, but no.”

Lamber had gotten angry, like he always did, but Jaskier knew him well enough by now to know he didn’t truly mean it, that he’d respect this choice. They all would. 

He held Ciri’s hand between his, smiled up at grizzled Vesemir, scarred Eskel, prickish Lambert, violet-eyed Yennefer. Yen smiled back at him, through too-bright violet eyes, and held a hand to his forehead.

“Sleep.”

And he did. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The next chapter will be a little more of the comfort part of the hurt/comfort, and will be posted later today or tomorrow.


	2. Chapter 2

He is standing in a meadow full of flowers, blue and white and yellow, and the sun is rising over the mountains in rose and blue and golden, painting a great dark keep in sunlight so the black walls wash silver and shadow-dark. It looks, almost, like Kaer Morhen, but Kaer Morhen at its height, Kaer Morhen like he’s never seen it in all his long winters living there, Kaer Morhen as only the mountains (and those as old as them) remember it, Kaer Morhen as it lives in the memories of those who loved it, larger than life, unfaltering.

He turns, surveying his surroundings the way Geralt taught him and Eskel helped him refine. He _appears_ to be alone, although it doesn’t feel like it. It feels… it feels like there’s someone else here, an old friend standing just behind his shoul--

 _“Jaskier_.”

And oh, he could _never_ forget that voice, not in forty years, not in four hundred. He whirls on his heel, feeling the smooth flow of the movement, the snap of muscles and joints like he’s twenty again, a fresh-faced stripling just out of Oxenfurt, playing in that tavern in Posada, not knowing what would happen after he begged three words out of the stranger in the corner--

 _Geralt_ is standing right there, with that soft _fond_ look in his eye that Jaskier has never seen him direct at anyone else, not Lambert, not Yen, not even Eskel, and Jaskier can’t breathe for it, for how much he’s missed this, missed _Geralt_ \--

And then those massive arms are around him, and his face is pressed against Geralt’s neck, and the last time this happened Geralt was _dead,_ was dead on the ground and there was blood soaking through his doublet, so how can this be happening, how can he be _here--_

 _“Hey,”_ Geralt’s voice comes rumbling through his chest, straight into Jaskier’s, “none of that. I’m here. We’re here.”

“Where’s here?”

“Where do you think?” Oh, and _there’s_ that dry wit he’s missed _so much_ , hidden beneath Geralt’s gruff monotone. He smiles against the Witcher’s neck, wrapping his arms more securely around his shoulders.

Geralt hums, contentedly, little more than an exhalation. “Been waiting for you.”

Jaskier presses a kiss into the side of his neck and lets him go. “I know.” Geralt smiles at that and yanks him in by the front of his doublet for a proper kiss, sweet and slow and promising more to come, before breaking away, huffing a laugh at the look on Jaskier’s face (he's not entirely sure what his face is doing, but with the number of emotions going through him it has to be absolutely _ridiculous_ ) and turning to look out at the mountain vista. Kaer Morhen is further away, now, a brilliant presence in the distance, a home always waiting for them to come back to, and the entire world is spread out before them like a map from their place on the high meadow.

Geralt reaches down and swings the padded sheathes that hold his swords up onto his shoulders with a soft grunt. He clicks to Roach, who comes cantering across the meadow, and he takes her lead rein and sets out on the road that wasn’t there a moment ago.

Jaskier grins, enjoying the way his face no longer wrinkles with the movement, swings his lute (that also wasn’t there a moment ago) around form where it’s hanging on his back, and sets off after him, strumming the opening chords to what is, and will always be, his favorite song for annoying his Witcher.

_“When a humble bard, graced a ride along with Geralt of Rivia…”_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey!  
> So I'm marking this as complete for now because this is where my original vision of the story ended; however, I may or may not be adding on some scenes from other character's perspectives as I feel like it.  
> I hope you enjoyed!

**Author's Note:**

> Whoo, this one was a _wild_ ride to write! It bit me and wouldn't let go until three in the morning, so yes, this was written in one sitting, edited in the morning, and posted. This is my first fic in the Witcher fandom; I hope it does justice to the characters and the world. 
> 
> Come say hi at my [tumblr](https://storm-and-starlight.tumblr.com/), storm-and-starlight.tumblr.com!
> 
> As always, comments and kudos are warmly welcomed and will be given a good home :)


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